If your brain is making you think of sex all the time, you are more likely to see someone you’re interested in as a means to an end, rather than a whole human being. It doesn’t make sex or sexual desire bad, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t be with someone just to have sex with them. However, it is something to be aware of, as a dismissal of women’s agency is pretty common.
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I agree. It’s not treating people like human beings that I don’t get, it’s the unifying theory of the category boundaries that would make you feel like you’re in the wrong one that I’m missing. Apparently it’s not just me.
ETA (also as a response to @popobawa4u): It really isn’t about making understanding someone conditional to respecting them, or trying to find a box to put people in. If someone tells me that they’re a woman called Susan, they’re a woman called Susan. No problem. I also wouldn’t ask them these kinds of questions, because that would be confrontational and irrelevant and besides, they understand this on a deeper level that may be impossible to explain in a way that I would understand. However, understanding someone is an important part of emphasising with them, so when people use terms like woman and man and I literally have no idea what they mean, it’s something I want to educate myself about. I understand what TERFs are talking about when they use those terms, even though I don’t agree with them. I want to show more acceptance and awareness of transgender individuals, which is why I asked the question on this thread (which seems like the most appropriate place, as I’m not confronting anybody about their own sexuality, just asking people with more knowledge or experience to explain it).
At the end of the day though, it isn’t particularly relevant to my interactions with individuals and there may not be any objective classification that works for everyone. As the Buzzfeed writer commented, gender can be a broken concept and you can still explicitly identify with one or the other. It’s just something that seems pretty important to quite a few people and seems to have a measurable effect, but the definition is elusive. I look forward to reading the book @anon50609448 suggested in any case, and in the meantime I’m OK with not having clear answers.
ETA2: The article writer expresses frustration about Caitlyn Jenner’s comments on her own womanhood, that it was liberating to be able to “wake up in the morning, get dressed, get ready to go out” - the kind of stereotypes that feminists want to at least downplay. I guess knowing what it means to be a woman has an element of innate identity that can’t be challenged, but also includes an element of experience, where you learn about what it means to be a woman in your culture by experiencing different internal and external pressures and their effects. These comments don’t put Caitlyn Jenner’s status as a woman in doubt, but they may suggest that she has some distorted ideas from her experience living as a man and may not be that well equipped to comment on womanhood in more general terms at this point - just as an eight year old cis girl may not have a particularly nuanced view of her female identity yet.
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The way I understand it, respect is not based upon belonging to a category. Sure, humans are a more inclusive stereotype than choosing a single sex or race, but it’s still the same mechanism of not really considering individuals.
It is not as if being born human is any more of an achievement than being born as any number of other species, whose worth may be equal to yours.
A little something for y’all (especially @codinghorror). Heterosexual Man, by the Odds, with video by Kids in the Hall
I’m a heterosexual man - it’s just a problem with my glands
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Outsiders.
I could have been a little clearer.
I usually find myself holding a flame for people on the fringe. Witches, ex-monks, Francis Bacon devotees, Chaos magicians etc… people who don’t fit into the mainstreams idea of itself and who for sure don’t want to modify themselves or the appearance of themselves in an attempt to fit. I think this means sexuality by way of romanticism in some way and usually with the benefit of close friendship borne of a shared air of misfittery.
‘I like interesting people’. Seems a little less sexy when I put it like that but whatevs! 
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It’s fluid, and most people land somewhere on the kinsey scale. People may also choose to seek romances with people they’re not sexually interested in, and that’s okay. People also have types of people they prefer and feel most comfortable with. that’s okay too. In my experiences, most people are generally straight and cis, but it doesn’t affect anyone until romance and dating come into play. and then choices differ. Some are more self aware, and some are more complicated in their desires.
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People also sleep with people they aren’t interested in romancing!
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Guilty of that too.
My wife and I once or twice had a conversation about this and the idea is foreign to her but not to any of the cis, het guys I know.
This is tangential to your (old) comment, but I’m trans and recently met a cis man who takes prescribed testosterone shots and I’ve been slowly learning from him about their effects on him and why he takes them, so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “cisness” and how it works. It seems people get cisgender hormones and surgeries all the time for a variety of reasons and no one thinks much of it. They’re not expected to undergo years of psychiatric counseling, nor do they get weird questions asked about what other cisgender medical interventions they plan on having, nor do they have to have a big coming out about it.
Perhaps some people aren’t strongly cis or trans, but it’s more convenient to appear cis for a variety of reasons. But that’s the way it goes: not all, but a lot of privilege comes with being able to pass for (cis, straight, etc, etc) whether or not you actually are. And conversely when you pass, society doesn’t continually mark you and remind you of your otherness in a category and you won’t as strongly identify with it. Some trans people who transitioned but have passed as cis afterwards for long enough, claim they no longer see themselves as trans, even though they obviously must have very strong gender identities.
So if some trans people, who were so driven that they went through the trouble of medically and socially transitioning, no longer see themselves as “trans”, it’s no wonder that many cis people, who haven’t had to go through all that, don’t think very much about being “cis”. I suspect many many people are strongly cis but have simply never been in a real situation where they’ve had to make hard choices based on that or been bothered for it, and so don’t realize just how cis they are. An abstract question won’t necessarily reveal these hidden preferences that would come out after years or decades of real life. So most cis people can have no way of knowing if they are strongly cis, weakly cis, or just cis for convenience, because society does not finely test where they fit in the cis spectrum.
More personally, and closer to sexuality than gender, I know before I started estrogen I thought of myself as purely attracted to women because I often had romantic crushes on them, but not on men. However there was perhaps a lot of not-straightness that was just swept under the rug, especially fantasies involving myself as a woman with men. After presenting as a woman more often in public, I found myself very drunk at a club one night saying I was basically just there to make out with men and couldn’t understand why the (self identified) crossdresser I was talking to wasn’t interested in them. This really caught me by surprise, even as I was saying it, but in retrospect, probably shouldn’t have. Now also, the kinds of feelings that I used to interpret as romantic crushes on women, now feel mostly like a strong desire to be friends and hug and stuff. So did my sexuality change, or did new circumstances simply reveal different aspects of it? It’s hard to say. The thing about “straightness” is it’s still a strong enough construct that perhaps anything that can get warped to fit into it, will be. And “cisness” is an even stronger social pressure.
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I’m afraid I have nothing of value to add, I just wanted to thank you for posting this. It was a thoughtful statement on these issues that many of us don’t think about too much, because we have the privilege of not having to do so.
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I’m suddenly reminded of a certain Steve Martin movie.
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My good friend that I’ve mentioned in other comments doesn’t see himself as trans or as a “trans-man.” He mentions conversations to me where people are discussing trans issues and someone reminds him, “Hey, you’re trans too” and he stops and goes “Oh yeah, I am!” He is just himself when he reflects on it at all.
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I expect I will never be allowed to escape thinking of myself as trans, but who knows? In many ways I don’t want to, because when I was young and trying to figure things out, some of the loudest trans voices on the internet were people saying not to do it if you weren’t going to pass, or that they themselves were good but other trans people were fakers, freaks, etc. Like they figured it would be easier for cis people to accept them if they had reasons to reject everyone else? I don’t want to discard a trans identity if it could lead to me accidentally contributing to that kind of pain.
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So the people in my head keep telling me 
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I loved it when The Lonely Island made fun of the whole “no homo” phenomenon.
They poke fun at dudebro homophobia a lot in their songs and it’s always awesome. In their Spring Break Anthem they juxtapose homoerotic dudebro spring break antics and gay marriage and it’s great. I remember a comment on the video was something like, “this song would be great without the gay stuff”. Talk about missing the point!
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…no they don’t.
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Your eloquence is outstanding.
I don’t have any unique perspective that would put a nice coda on your story. I was an unplanned little dude who was largely brought up without overt societal pressure (my parents thought I was gay till I was 17), and lived in the arts. I kinda had a golden ticket as a tall, white, reasonably decent looking individual, but people that look like me have… Never been who I related to.
I’m rambling.
I have low testosterone, and one of the things you mentioned pointed out how it’s a given that getting treatment for low T as a cis guy is barely even worth mentioning. It is just part of who you are, right? But getting the same sort of thing for a different hormone means you have to acquiesce to something akin to a purity test? I just don’t buy it.
Thank you for your contribution and narrative, it is a personal tale and (at least to me) profound.
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